Ava DuVernay Brings Balance to the Force with #CelebrateStarWarsVII

Yesterday before the trailer aired, many of you probably noticed what happened on Twitter. A group of people pretending to be fans started an hashtag on Twitter called BoycottStarWarsVII pretending The Force Awakens was an “anti-white” movie as one of the main character of the movie is played by an actor of color.
First these so-called fans are completely stupid, spreading hate and racism is unacceptable and secondly, this group of people have never seen any Star Wars movies, there were actors of color in the Prequels and the Originals – Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu, Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian, Ahmed Best as Jar Jar Binks, James Earl Jones as Darth Vader’s voice. Star Wars always had a great diversity in all its 6 movies, diversity in color and also with powerful strong women characters with Natalie Portman as Padmé Amidala and Carrie Fisher as Leia. Star Wars has always been for everyone. Star Wars is for everyone.

In the middle of the hateful hashtag trend of yesterday, something good happened, the brilliant Ava DuVernay the director of the movie Selma started an hashtag called #CelebrateStarWarsVII to counter the hate that was spreading. She had the best reaction by doing this hashtag, answering with love was the right thing to do.

Quickly, a lot of people followed Ava’s hashtag and started using #CelebrateStarWarsVII, showing love for Star Wars and the diversity of its cast. It showed that the Star Wars fandom is happy about the diversity of the cast and that the racists who did BoycottStarWarsVII do not represent this fandom. I’m proud to be a Star Wars fan and I am happy to see that so many people used the hashtag Ava created to spread love. I want to say thank you to Ava DuVernay for doing this and silencing the racist trolls!

J.J. Abrams the director of The Force Awakens also personally stepped in with a tweet on the twitter of Bad Robot (his movie production company) that reminded people once again that Star Wars is for everyone.